Séminaire du LPTMS: Michele Filippone *** séminaire exceptionnel ***

Michele Filippone (Université de Genève, Suisse)

We investigate persistent currents for a fixed number of fermions in periodic quantum ladders threaded by Aharonov-Bohm and transverse magnetic fluxes Φ and χ. We show that the coupling between ladder legs provides a way to effectively change the ground-state fermion-number parity, by varying χ. We demonstrate that varying χ by 2π (one flux quantum) leads to an apparent fermion-number parity switch. We find that persistent currents exhibit a robust 4π periodicity as a function of χ, despite the fact that χ→χ+2π leads to modifications of order 1/N of the energy spectrum, where N is the number of sites in each ladder leg. We connect the parity switching effect to the quantum Hall regime in two-dimensional systems. We show that the parity switching effect is related to the parity of the number of filled Landau levels and that it inherits strong robustness against disorder in the Harper-Hofstadter quantum Hall regime. Indeed, we show that the 4π periodicity is a mesoscopic manifestation of a novel type of fermionic pumping in topological systems, complementary to Thouless' pump. Focusing on the low-energy edge physics in the general framework of Chern-Simons theory, we discuss this alternative type of pumping in the context of integer and fractional quantum Hall systems. Our construction provides an intuitive setting to understand known effects and explore new ones. In particular, we show that adding superconductivity to the picture allows us to recover the 4π Josephson effect of Majorana fermions and its generalizations to parafermions. The parity-switching and the 4π periodicity effects are robust with respect to temperature and disorder and we outline potential physical realizations using Corbino disk geometries in solid state systems, quantum ladders with cold atomic gases and, for bosonic analogs of the effects, photonic lattices.
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Séminaire du LPTMS: Michele Filippone *** séminaire exceptionnel ***

Michele Filippone (Université de Genève, Suisse)

We investigate persistent currents for a fixed number of fermions in periodic quantum ladders threaded by Aharonov-Bohm and transverse magnetic fluxes Φ and χ. We show that the coupling between ladder legs provides a way to effectively change the ground-state fermion-number parity, by varying χ. We demonstrate that varying χ by 2π (one flux quantum) leads to an apparent fermion-number parity switch. We find that persistent currents exhibit a robust 4π periodicity as a function of χ, despite the fact that χ→χ+2π leads to modifications of order 1/N of the energy spectrum, where N is the number of sites in each ladder leg. We connect the parity switching effect to the quantum Hall regime in two-dimensional systems. We show that the parity switching effect is related to the parity of the number of filled Landau levels and that it inherits strong robustness against disorder in the Harper-Hofstadter quantum Hall regime. Indeed, we show that the 4π periodicity is a mesoscopic manifestation of a novel type of fermionic pumping in topological systems, complementary to Thouless’ pump. Focusing on the low-energy edge physics in the general framework of Chern-Simons theory, we discuss this alternative type of pumping in the context of integer and fractional quantum Hall systems. Our construction provides an intuitive setting to understand known effects and explore new ones. In particular, we show that adding superconductivity to the picture allows us to recover the 4π Josephson effect of Majorana fermions and its generalizations to parafermions. The parity-switching and the 4π periodicity effects are robust with respect to temperature and disorder and we outline potential physical realizations using Corbino disk geometries in solid state systems, quantum ladders with cold atomic gases and, for bosonic analogs of the effects, photonic lattices.